Olivia Attwood is talking about her achievements when she starts mock retching. “I don’t want to say this out loud — it makes me feel sick because it feels like I’m bigging myself up — but I’m the first person to do what I’ve done from Love Island,” she says. “Because I’m a woman and the way that I look, people don’t want to highlight that. I think if one of the boys [from Love Island] had done it, it would have been, ‘he’s a trailblazer’, ‘a stand-out star’.”
Attwood is straight-shooting and it’s easy to see why hordes of young women love her, but the way she looks is certainly relevant too. The former model’s Instagram account, which has 2.2 million followers, has an OnlyFans-meets-television-queen flavour. Alongside pictures of her dressed to the nines as she heads to work in TV, there are countless “thirst trap” thongs-and-tassels photos of her semi-naked posing on boats, balconies and in bathrooms. “I have always been very in touch with my femininity,” she says, recently returned from a holiday raving in Ibiza. “I know what makes me feel good, what I feel sexy in, empowered in. I don’t need to water myself down.”
Naturally she has a professional footballer husband too, the midfielder Bradley Dack, who has just been released from Sunderland. In one video clip on Instagram he grabs her bum like a man fresh from a lengthy prison stretch (her work commitments had kept them apart for a month). In another clip she’s in a push-up bra and thong promoting a fake tan by rubbing it all over her cleavage.
Attwood politely declines to tell me what she can earn from a single product-promoting post: “One of the first rules I was taught was ‘never talk about money’.” Although she later tells me that she recently spent £700 on a pair of Saint Laurent jeans, so we can safely assume she is making plenty.
So far, so reality show survivor. However, the 33-year-old has pulled off what most reality show contestants can only dream of: she has turned her 15 minutes into a credible career making documentaries for ITV, appearing on daytime television, including Loose Women, and hosting a podcast, Olivia Attwood’s So Wrong It’s Right, which hit No 1 in the charts after it launched in February.
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At the Edinburgh TV Festival last year Paul Mortimer, director of reality and acquisitions at ITV, described her as “the face of the future a great talent who is being nurtured by ITV and working her way slowly through the ranks. Inevitably I believe she will be the new Cilla Black.” Clearly it is on Attwood that the ITV executives are placing their bets.
Once upon a time the enviable It girls — the Victorias, Tamaras and Taras — were high-society, workshy darlings who were chummy with the royals. Relatable they were not. Today the modern iteration — surely It girl is a cancelled term? — is a hard-grafting, hard(ish)-partying woman of the people whose pedigree is measured in social media-influencer worth. In the fickle world of likes and swipes, relatability and authenticity are precious commodities. Attwood has both.
Her viewing habits include watching hours of archive footage of interviewing legends, such as David Letterman and Michael Parkinson. Does she want to be the new Parky? “Five years ago I would never even vocalise a dream like that, but I feel like I’m in a position now where I could potentially say yes,” she says. “I’m not going to lie — that would be a dream.”
So how did the former motorsport grid girl from Surrey complete the fickle reality TV fame game to reach the next level of showbiz stardom? “As soon as I’d decided what I wanted to do, I became relentlessly focused on that. Every decision I’ve made over the last five years has been about a bigger picture,” she says. “There’s always going to be someone prettier than you, someone smarter than you or whatever, but I can outwork anyone.”
This isn’t a rag-to-riches story. Attwood grew up in Surrey with her Canadian father, Kai, a financial translator, her mother, Jennifer, a former model, and her younger brother and sister. It was a privileged childhood of private education at Cranleigh School (although she was banned from boarding for being too disruptive — causing the other girls to run riot) and reluctant riding (“horsey women are some of the toughest bitches you’ll ever meet”). School was a struggle; she is dyslexic and was also diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in her early twenties. The fact that ADHD is often underdiagnosed or diagnosed later in life for women clearly rankles. “A boy falling off a tree and breaking his arm, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s a boy.’ Or knocking a drink over, or throwing something at someone, it’s like, ‘Naughty little boy,’ ” she says. “Girls really quickly learn from the age of five or six through social conditioning that certain behaviours are undesirable, not funny, not cute. So we learn to mask. It’s a hard diagnosis because the symptoms present themselves very differently.”
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As a teen, alcohol quietened the noise in her head. “I think about my younger self sometimes and I feel really sad for her. I was always funny, always the clown, but there was a lot going on inside,” she recalls. “I was highly anxious for many years as a result of not understanding myself or how to cope.”
She dropped out of sixth-form college after a few weeks to focus on modelling, clubbing and dating older men. “Thinking about my unborn children, the idea of them putting themselves in any of the situations we did actually makes my blood run cold,” she says of those partying days. “It was dangerous.”
The mainstream modelling agencies, however, thought she looked too “girl next door”. “When I was 16 I had them saying, ‘Go down the lads’ mags [route],’ ” she says. Instead, in her early twenties, she became a motorsport grid girl for Monster Energy, the drinks company and sponsor. “I literally lived out of a suitcase. Every country you can possibly think of I went to. They actually prefer you didn’t fraternise with drivers or the mechanical teams, in terms of not blurring that line. We are meant to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
Earlier this year Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal and husband of Geri “Ginger Spice” Horner, was accused of “inappropriate behaviour” by his personal assistant. He was cleared of misconduct but the claims shone a light on the darker underbelly of the sport. “I didn’t even compare it to motorsport culture,” Attwood says, offering a different perspective. “To me it’s just men-with-a lot-of-power culture. Take away the cars and everything else, he’s just the boss of a huge organisation, it doesn’t actually matter where.”
Formula 1 scrapped using grid girls in the post #MeToo landscape of 2018, but Attwood doesn’t view the gig as belonging to a dated era: “That job saved my life. I travelled the world, it gave me discipline, I met amazing people, so to me it’d be pretty sad to think someone else wouldn’t get that opportunity.”
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And, crucially, her work on the track caught the attention of Love Island bosses, who begged her to join the show. She hesitantly accepted and, in 2017, came third on series three after being “sharp-tongued and slightly volatile”, to use her own words. Her lasting legacy was introducing viewers to the concept of getting the off-putting “ick” about a partner. Although she didn’t win, Attwood emerged the star — gorgeous, opinionated, funny and brash.
Now on its 11th series, this year’s villa has been spiced up by Joey Essex, already reality royalty thanks to The Only Way Is Essex, joining the islanders and promptly rolling around in bed with his ex-girlfriend.
• Olivia Attwood: I regret having a boob job at 20 and Botox at 25
Attwood has seen first-hand how brutal the world of reality television can be, but thinks the duty-of-care measures have improved in recent years. “The levels on which you have to be [psychiatrically] assessed before getting on a show every single year become harder, I think, and those restrictions become tighter,” she says, adding that it is the post-show aftermath where the most pressure comes. “The problem is often not the shows themselves that cause people any kind of trauma, it’s the way that viewers consume television, the way they react to television, that often is the problem. How do you prepare someone for that? It’s very difficult.”
Through Love Island Attwood became close friends with Caroline Flack, the presenter of the show, who took her own life in February 2020, triggering important conversations about television, fame and mental health safeguarding. Back in 2017, after Love Island wrapped, Flack consciously looked out for Attwood amid the criticism and overnight-fame craziness. “I was really thrust into the fire when I came out. I was a controversial character and I had a lot of press attention,” she recalls. “Caroline was someone that texted with me, continually checked in on me. We were in contact up until the end, so it’s really tough.”
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After the show catapulted her into the limelight at the age of 26, she appeared in predictable reality TV shows, including The Only Way Is Essex, and she hasn’t abandoned that merry-go-round — ITVX’s Olivia Marries Her Match charted the run-up to her nuptials last year. That was as lowbrow as it sounds but, at the same time, Attwood was forging her way into more serious documentary making.
“Our Cilla” seems a bit of a stretch, but she is following the path carved out by Stacey Dooley on the BBC. Earlier this year, The Price of Perfection, Attwood’s programme about cosmetic procedures and dodgy beauty jabs from cowboy practitioners, was streamed more than 5.4 million times. I stopped watching at minute eight when one woman’s face was being sliced open. “It’s a smell you can’t ever forget,” Attwood says, recalling her front-row seat to the facelift.
Getting Filthy Rich, her show about selling sex online, has involved delving into the world of the adult subscription website OnlyFans, plus stripping and sugar daddies. She has just filmed a third series in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, with one episode focusing on financial domination. “It is a kink where people have their finances dominated, where the dom [the person in control in the relationship] will be, like, ‘Give me money,’ ” Attwood says. “There’s no sexual exchange, it is a sexual psychological kink. It’s everywhere at the minute and, for some reason, the demand is growing.”
On screen, she comes across as nonjudgmental and genuinely curious. “It doesn’t come with that heavy dollop of condescension, which a lot of documentaries do. It doesn’t come with that head-tilt thing,” Attwood says, tilting her head. “We shed the light on the dark, but the shows were never meant to be about patronising people.”
Now, she’s entered her fewer-parties, fatter-paycheques era. She regularly appears as a panellist on ITV’s Loose Women and later this year she will present a new reality show set somewhere sunny, the details of which are still hush-hush.
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There are examples of other former reality stars who have managed to make it on prime time — Rylan Clark, Alison Hammond, a gaggle of the Made in Chelsea poshos — but this is not an easy switch. “If you’ve done reality TV you get in that box, you’ve got to stay in that box, and for the people who’ve broken out, they’ve done that by removing themselves as far as possible. It’s like a dirty past secret,” Attwood says. “There is obviously a generalisation that people that do Love Island are unintelligent or vapid, or there’s no depth. And in some cases that might be true.”
And then, earlier this year, came the inevitable podcast. Leaning in to “anti-agony aunt” ramblings, she is a gobbier version of the Cambridge-educated mega podcaster Elizabeth Day. On So Wrong It’s Right she has interviewed Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown about her experiences of domestic violence and also recorded episodes where she natters with her mum, sister, best mate and hair stylist. She is endlessly “obsessed”.
Among all the various male comedians, historians and mansplainers, for a few golden weeks she was top of the charts. “I was definitely aware of men dominating the podcast world. We’ve all seen those memes on Instagram that are, like, ‘another man with a podcast’,” she says, before bringing up America’s most famous podcaster. “Joe Rogan is great at what he does, but men like him are also great at really controversial soundbites, which in terms of the algorithm and clicks and driving people there’s an art to that.” Series two is already in the works.
These days she lives with Dack in supercars-and-mega-mansions Cheshire and is more familiar with footballers than racing drivers. Of her level of interest in football, she says: “What’s less than zero?” The WAGs of 2024, now in Germany for the Euros, don’t compare with those of the feverish days of Baden-Baden during 2006’s World Cup. “The clubs made this conscious effort after the WAG fame soared so that the girls should be very seen and not heard. These girls that I’ve met, anyway, they’re very unassuming, not brash, not loud,” says Attwood, who has avoided watching the tournament. “There is the odd exception.” Besides, snaring a professional footballer isn’t all it is cracked up to be, according to her. “There are way better avenues of a lifestyle that you can chase. Date a rich guy that works in the City or has a business,” she advises.
In previous interviews Attwood has spoken about getting a boob job at 20, a boob reduction at 27, plus freezing and filling her face with various jabs. There was a period where she now realises that she overdid it with lip filler injections: “I looked like I was smuggling frankfurters. They almost touched my ears.” Generally, though, she is keen to move the conversation away from appearances: “The way I look is not something I spend much time thinking about, whereas before I think the way I looked was everything. It was the only thing that really mattered.”
All episodes of So Wrong It’s Right are available now. Series two airs this summer
